1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the delivery, discovery, management and control of information to mobile consumers, and more particularly to consumers who have access to multiple devices, capabilities and networks, and to the efficient use and control of these resources to consume and generate information.
2. Description of the Related Art
It has become customary for people to generate and consume information in a variety of contexts and situations. This need is never more prominent as when people are mobile. Starting with the simply stated need to be “reachable,” people now want to be connected to various information resources and use the associated networks and resources to carry out simple and complex tasks that they face everyday.
A decade or so ago, the personal computer (PC), either desktop or laptop, was the main tool for accessing information. A necessary aspect of the PC is that it requires almost the complete attention of the user, i.e., it is difficult to do many other things at the same time as using the PC because of the tethering, weight, and form factor of the device. With the advent of mobile computing devices such as smartphones, it is now commonplace to find people attempting multiple tasks simultaneously, e.g., driving while talking on a mobile phone. In some cases multi-tasking is useful and advantageous, while in other cases it may be physically dangerous to others and oneself. Management of capabilities that are potentially available to a consumer would be an extremely valuable service.
The systems and methods in use today that enable a user to be “reachable” or to have access rely heavily on the user carrying a mobile device. However, mobile devices often have limitations in bandwidth, capacity or connectivity that prevent their use in certain situations. For example, consider a mobile device that may be connected to a network that has low bandwidth but is within range of other resources, e.g., a different network that provides more bandwidth. A mobile device, however, may only support one network interface and, hence, may not be capable of utilizing the higher bandwidth network because it is connected to the lower bandwidth network.
Even when a mobile device is connected to a resource (i.e., access network, display device, storage and computing resource, etc.), it may not be adequately connected since the suitability of a connection depends on the service, i.e., the application that the user intends to run on the device. In present day mobile computing environments some applications mandate a certain type of network. For example, early versions of the iPhone mandated that mobile video could only be accessed using a WiFi network. More recent versions of the iPhone support both WiFi and cellular 3G access to mobile video resources, leaving the user to decide which access network to use, or the device uses a programmed policy to choose a network type.
The current trend in mobile devices and networks is to support multiple radios and multiple radio access bearers (mRAB), a feature of the so-called 3G UMTS (Universal Mobile Terrestrial System) technology. With the introduction of various types of networking technologies, it is expected that a variety of devices will broadcast information about themselves and their capabilities for other devices to use.
Thus, the ability of devices to carry out multiple simultaneous tasks is expected to continue to grow. A device concurrently executing a multiplicity of tasks has need for many resources and may carry out those tasks more efficiently by switching resources around. A pre-determined policy of matching resources to tasks, however, may be too restrictive. Allowing a single application to demand a resource without knowledge of all the resource options may be of detriment to it and other concurrent applications.
Further, when concurrent applications are being run on a mobile device, the service provider may choose to disallow the concurrent execution of certain applications, e.g., initiating a voice call and a mobile video session while a video session is in progress. Alternatively, certain combinations of concurrent applications may be allowed or disallowed only when certain resources are or become available.
For example, in some networks, call forwarding commands were disallowed when such commands led from one device to another that was previously in the call forwarding loop. But detecting such feature interaction problems is computationally difficult and in general undefined. The problem becomes further complicated when external resources become a part of the problem specification.
There is, therefore, a need for an entity to match the needs of concurrent mobile applications on a mobile device with the available resources in the device's environment in order for successfully carrying out or limiting and controlling the tasks at hand.